What Progressives Can Learn From Their California Failures

In California, my home state, Democrats have dominated the capitol since roughly 1970. In the last four-plus decades, they've controlled both houses of the state legislature for all but two years. They dominate the state bureaucracy and the leadership of most major cities. And they've long dominated the vast majority of statewide offices, the governorship excepted: Since Ronald Reagan departed in 1975, it has gone back and forth between Democrats (like current and former governor Jerry Brown) and Republicans, most recently the moderate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Despite this, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times opinion writer, has managed to write a column that proceeds as if, insofar as partisans can be blamed, Republicans are entirely to blame for the state's woes, which he thinks are exaggerated, while Democrats bear no responsibility. As a Californian who hasn't given up on his place of residence, I'm glad to see Krugman thinks there are good times ahead for the Golden State, but the analysis that precedes his conclusion is causing me to doubt him. It's true that supermajority rules have constrained Democratic legislative majorities,
that California residents have added to the dysfunction of state
governance with the cumulative effect of constraining ballot initiatives they've
passed, and that California Republicans are failures in too many ways to
list. But I'd be guilty of false equivalence, dear reader,
if I didn't assure you that Democrats bear more blame, largely because
they've had the opportunity and responsibility to exercise so much more power, and weren't exactly starved of revenue compared to what other states take in.

Disagree?

Fine, let's set aside the question of who is more at fault. Here is a weaker claim. Democratic rule in California has included serious sins of omission and commission by the progressive-liberal coalition that has more often than not been in charge, and the left would do well to learn from those mistakes so that it can govern better, instead of pretending, like Krugman, that they don't exist, and that everything would function smoothly if only they were able to raise state taxes.

Here are five examples of misgovernance for which they bear full or partial responsibility.

Lesson 1: Gerrymandering Polarizes

The Democrats who've long run the California legislature have used their control over legislative districts as politicians are wont to do: as an incumbent-protection racket. Over time, everyone was put into safe seats, and the cooperative Republican minority was coming from such ridiculously unrepresentative districts that the whole party shifted sharply to the right: The primary was all that mattered. Thankfully, California voters handed power to a nonpartisan redistricting commission in 2010. Then in 2011, state Democrats went about gaming that system too.

Lesson 2: Public Employee Pensions Can Bankrupt a State

In City Journal, Steven Malanga provides a recent history of public employee pensions in California:

In 1991, with the nation mired in a recession and the state in a
fiscal crisis, the California legislature closed the existing pension
system to new workers, for whom it created a second "tier." This less
expensive plan no longer required the worker to make a pension
contribution, and it lowered the value of his pension to 1.25 percent of
his final average salary for every year he had worked; further, he
could begin to receive the pension only at 65. A 40-year veteran with a
final average salary of $50,000 would thus qualify for a $25,000
pension, plus Social Security benefits.

The state's public-sector unions hated the new tier, of course, and
their growing influence over CalPERS's board of directors meant that it,
too, was soon lobbying against the 1991 reform. Six of the board's 13
members are chosen by government workers, and as union power grew in
California, those six increasingly tended to be labor honchos. Two more
members are statewide elected officials (California's treasurer and
controller), and another two are appointed by the governor--so by 1999,
when union-backed Gray Davis became governor and union-backed Phil
Angelides became state treasurer, the CalPERS board was wearing a "union
label," noted the New York Times. As the newspaper added,
critics worried that the board had become so partisan that its "ability
to provide for the 1.3 million public employees whose pensions it
guarantees" was in doubt.

The critics were right to worry about
CalPERS's bias. In 1999, the fund's board concocted an astonishing
proposal that would take all the post-1991 state employees and
retroactively put them in the older, more expensive pension system. The
initiative went still further, lowering the retirement age for all state
workers and sweetening the pension formula for police and firefighters
even more. Public-safety workers could potentially retire at 50 with 90
percent of their salaries, and other government workers at 55 with 60
percent of their salaries.

CalPERS wrote the legislation for these changes and then persuaded
lawmakers to pass it. In pushing for the change, though, the pension
fund downplayed the risks involved. A 17-page brochure about the
proposal that CalPERS handed to legislators reads like a pitch letter,
not a serious fiscal analysis. The state could offer these fantastic
benefits to workers at no cost, proclaimed the brochure: "No increase
over current employer contributions is needed for these benefit
improvements." The state's annual contribution to the pension fund--$776
million in 1998--would remain relatively unchanged in the years ahead,
the brochure predicted.

But the board members knew that there was a downside. CalPERS staff had
provided them with scenarios based on different ways the market might
perform. In the worst case, a long 1970s-style downturn, government
contributions to the fund would have to rise by billions of dollars
(which is basically what wound up happening). CalPERS neglected to
include that worst-case scenario in its legislative brochure. And though
the board later claimed that it had offered a full analysis to anyone
who asked, key players at the time deny it. Even the state senator who
sponsored the law, Deborah Ortiz, says that lawmakers received little of
substance from the fund's representatives. "We probed and probed and
asked questions 100 times," she told the San Jose Mercury News in
2003. "The CalPERS staff assured us that even in the worst-case
scenario the state's general fund would take a $300 million hit," a
manageable sum in a $99 billion state budget. (The actual cost to the
state budget, it turned out, was more than ten times that estimate--and
it's still climbing.)

The catastrophic pension deal that Davis presided over had ramifications, direct and indirect, for cities all over the state. For a staggering look at the end result, see Michael Lewis' November 2011 article.

Lesson 3: Public Employee Unions Can Have a Pernicious Affect on Public Policy

There is perhaps no better example in America of this phenomenon than the California prison guard's union. As Tim Cavanaugh wrote in Reason:

The prison guards union regularly makes seven-figure
contributions both to political candidates and to ballot initiative
campaigns, nearly all of it with the goal of preventing any decline
in the state's bulging prison population. CCPOA gave $1 million to
the successful 2008 campaign against Proposition 5, which would
have reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug
offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison. The
initiative failed by nearly 20 percentage points.

To maintain California's prison-industrial complex, CCPOA must
also plow money into broader defenses of the status quo. In 2008
the union gave $250,000 to fight a legislative redistricting
referendum and $2 million to oppose a change to the state's
political term limit laws. The union is no respecter of political party, having made large
contributions to both Democratic and Republican governors and to
legislative candidates from both parties... CCPOA's most direct interest is in retaining the state's iron
web of sentencing laws and its stringent 'three strikes' regime.

Voters and conservatives certainly bear part of the blame for California's swollen prison population, but the party in power is always implicated in special-interest victories. What's gone on since Jerry Brown took over? "Deep in the 200-page contract that Gov. Jerry Brown recently approved
for state prison guards is a provision that could generate a cash
windfall to the officers when they retire," the Los Angeles Timesreported. "The guards, who are
among Brown's largest political benefactors, would be able to save an
unlimited number of vacation days under their new deal. When they leave
state service, those days could be exchanged for cash at their final pay
rate, which would probably be higher than when they earned the time
off. The governor is extending this benefit only to members of the
California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., a union that spent nearly
$2 million to help him win election last year. Removing the decades-old limit on accrued vacation -- now 80 days for
most state employees -- would be a 'huge liability' for taxpayers, said
Nick Schroeder of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office... The deal also would give the members 18 more days off over the life
of the two-year contract, according to Schroeder, bringing the typical
prison guard's time off to more than eight weeks in the first year."

Two months vacation for new employees!

Lesson 4: It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Fire the Worst Teachers

The Los Angeles Timestook a look at the tenure system that Democrats mostly support, and that Republicans mostly want to reform:

It's remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in
California, a Times investigation has found. The path can be laborious
and labyrinthine, in some cases involving years of investigation, union
grievances, administrative appeals, court challenges and re-hearings... Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and
draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make
the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of
firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other
immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of
rules such as showing up on time.

* Although districts generally
press ahead with only the strongest cases, even these get knocked down
more than a third of the time by the specially convened review panels,
which have the discretion to restore teachers' jobs even when grounds
for dismissal are proved.

* Jettisoning a teacher solely because
he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were
upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.

When teaching
is at issue, years of effort -- and thousands of dollars -- sometimes
go into rehabilitating the teacher as students suffer. Over the three
years before he was fired, one struggling math teacher in Stockton was
observed 13 times by school officials, failed three year-end
evaluations, was offered a more desirable assignment and joined a
mentoring program as most of his ninth-grade students flunked his
courses. As a case winds its way through the system, legal costs can soar into the six figures.

Meanwhile,
said Kendra Wallace, principal of Daniel Webster Middle School on Los
Angeles' Westside, an ineffective teacher can instruct 125 to 260
students a year -- up to 1,300 in the five years she says it often takes
to remove a tenured employee. "The hardest conversation to have
is when a student comes in and looks at you and says, 'Can you please
come teach our class?' " she said.

Lesson 5: Why Not Repeal Well-Intentioned Laws When They Prove to Be Inane Debacles?

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home
Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside
upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame,
like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting.
Because foam is highly flammable, the bureau's regulation, Technical
Bulletin 117, can be met only by adding large quantities of chemical
flame retardants -- usually about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the
foam -- at the point of manufacture. The state's size makes it
impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for
different markets, so about 80 percent of the home furniture and most of
the upholstered office furniture sold in the United States complies
with California's regulation. "We live in a foam-filled world, and a lot
of the foam is filled with these chemicals," Blum says.

The problem is that flame retardants don't seem to stay in foam. High
concentrations have been found in the bodies of creatures as
geographically diverse as salmon, peregrine falcons, cats, whales, polar
bears and Tasmanian devils. Most disturbingly, a recent study of
toddlers in the United States conducted by researchers at Duke
University found flame retardants in the blood of every child they
tested. The chemicals are associated with an assortment of health
concerns, including antisocial behavior, impaired fertility, decreased
birth weight, diabetes, memory loss, undescended testicles, lowered
levels of male hormones and hyperthyroidism.

Conclusions

What vexes me most about California governance is the pervasive dysfunction. Whatever one thinks about taxation in the state, disagreements about how big government should be and what it should do are proper and unavoidable. But the flame-retardant-couch law? The inability to fire the worst teachers in a timely manner? The pernicious giveaways to the California prison guards? The public-employee pensions so unsustainable that they've already bankrupted cities? The gerrymandering? The inability to provide accurate cost estimates for high-speed rail? These problems aren't rooted in different ideological visions or the minority party's intransigence.

They're just amateur hourish -- seemingly undeniable evidence of inept governance. The state needs its own Washington Monthly just to chronicle all of the dysfunction. Says Krugman, "at this point the state's G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing
even its power to obstruct -- and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an
agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably
like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the
radical right." Fair enough. The Democrats are running things now. Let's see how quickly they fix the problems that I've mentioned, now that nothing matters save their own ability to govern, or lack thereof. I predict that the legislature will remain captive to teacher and prison-guard unions, that public-employee pensions will continue to eat up an unsustainable share of the state's revenue, that the increased tax revenue will largely be steered to special-interest groups, and that Democrats will prove unable to complete large infrastructure projects on time or on budget. Let's revisit in a year to see if my pessimism or Krugman's optimism proves closer to the mark.

I sincerely hope I am proved wrong.

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Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.